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The constant motivation for lower fuel consumption and emission levels has always been in the minds of most auto makers. Therefore, it is important to have precise control of the fuel being delivered into the engine. Gasoline Port fuel injection has been a matured system for many years and cars sold in emerging markets still favor such system due to its less system complexity and cost. This paper will explain injection control strategy of today during development, and especially the injector dead-time compensation strategy in detail and how further improvements could still be made. The injector current profile behavior will be discussed, and with the use of minimum hardware electronics, this paper will show the way for a new compensation strategy to be adopted.

A variety of methodologies to use embedded multicore controllers efficiently has been discussed in the last years. Several assumptions are usually made in the automotive domain, such as static assignment of tasks to the cores. This paper shows an approach for efficient task allocation depending on different system modes. An engine management system (EMS) is used as application example, and the performance improvement compared to static allocation is assessed. The paper is structured as follows: First the control algorithms for the EMS will be classified according to operating modes. The classified algorithms will be allocated to the cores, depending on the operating mode. We identify mode transition points, allowing a reliable switch without neglecting timing requirements. As a next step, it will be shown that a load distribution by mode-dependent task allocation would be better balanced than a static task allocation.

Multi-core systems are adopted quickly in the automotive domain, Proof of concepts have been implemented for power train, body and chassis, involving hard real-time constraints. However, depending on the degree of integration, it can be costly, especially in those cases where existing single-core software has to be migrated over. Furthermore, there seems to be a high level of uncertainty, whether a found solution, with regards to partitioning, mapping and orchestration of software is close to an optimum solution. Some integrated solutions demonstrate considerably less performance, for instance due to communication overhead compared to execution on single-core systems. This paper discusses a methodology, as to how to effectively and efficiently investigate the software architecture design space for multi-core software development.

The aim of this paper is to compile the state of the art of engine control and develop scenarios for improvements in a number of applications of engine control where the pace of technology change is at its most marked. The first application is control of downsized engines with enhancement of combustion using direct injection, variable valve actuation and turbo charging. The second application is electrification of the powertrain with its impact on engine control. Various architectures are explored such as micro, mild, full hybrid and range extenders. The third application is exhaust gas after-treatment, with a focus on the trade-off between engine and after-treatment control. The fourth application is implementation of powertrain control systems, hardware, software, methods, and tools. The paper summarizes several examples where the performance depends on the availability of control systems for automotive applications.

The increasingly stringent requirements in relation to emission reduction and onboard diagnostics are pushing the Chinese automotive industry toward more innovative solutions and a rapid increase in electronic control performance. To manage the system complexity the architecture will require being well structure on hardware and software level. The paper introduces GEMS-K1 (Gasoline Engine Management System - Kit 1). GEMS-K1 is a platform being compliant with Euro IV emission regulation for gasoline engines. The application software is developed using modeling language, the code is automatically generated from the model. The driver software has a well defined structure including microcontroller abstraction layer and ECU abstraction layer. The hardware is following design rules to be robust, 100% testable and easy to manufacture. The electronic components use the latest innovation in terms of architecture and technologies.

More than ever, microcontroller performance in cars has a direct impact on the driving experience, on compliance with improved safety, ever-stricter emissions regulations, and on fuel economy. The simple microcontrollers formerly used in automobiles are now being replaced by powerful number-crunchers with incredible levels of peripheral integration. As a result, performance can no longer be measured in MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second). A microcontroller's effectiveness is based on coherent partitioning between analog and digital, hardware and software, tools and methodology. To make an informed choice among the available devices, the designer needs benchmarks that are specific to automotive applications, and which provide a realistic representation of how the device will perform in the automotive environment.

This paper will give an overview of multicore in automotive applications, covering the trends, benefits, challenges, and implementation scenarios. The automotive silicon industry has been building multicore and multiprocessor systems for a long time. The reasons for this choice have been: increased performance, safety redundancy, increased I/O & peripheral, access to multiple architectures (performance type e.g. DSP) and technologies. In the past, multiprocessors have been mainly considered as multi-die, multi-package with simple interconnection such as serial or parallel busses with possible shared memories. The new challenge is to implement a multicore, micro-processor that combines two or more independent processors into a single package, often a single integrated circuit (IC). The multicores allow a computing device to exhibit some form of thread-level parallelism (TLP).

More than ever, microcontroller performance in cars has a direct impact on the driving experience, on compliance with improved safety, ever-stricter emissions regulations, and on fuel economy. The simple microcontrollers formerly used in automobiles are now being replaced by powerful number-crunchers whose performance can no longer be measured in MIPS. Instead, their effectiveness is based on a coherent partitioning between analog and digital, hardware and software, tools and methodology. To make an informed choice among the available devices, what the designer needs are benchmarks that are specific to automotive applications, and which provide a realistic representation of how the device will perform in the automotive environment. This presentation will explore the role of new benchmarks in the development of complex automotive applications.

FlexRay1 is a high speed, time triggered and fault tolerant communication protocol, which was specified to meet the requirements of safety-critical automotive applications. The achieved maturity of FlexRay encourages the implementation on silicon. The CIC-3102 device is a standalone controller provided by Infineon Technologies. It runs the wide spread E-Ray3 IP from Bosch. A complete communication node for FlexRay requires additional devices for the physical layer and the application part. The CIC-310 can communicate with a host controller via three different interfaces micro link interface MLI, serial synchronous interface SSC, external bus XMU. Its physical layer interface corresponds to the FlexRay specification. The CIC-310 provides features like intelligent move engines to maximize the achievable data rate as well as to minimize the workload of the host. Therefore, the CIC-310 allows a very flexible and efficient way to build and operate FlexRay nodes.

The increasingly stringent requirements in relation to safety, fuel economy, emission reduction, and onboard diagnostics are pushing the automotive industry toward more innovative solutions and a rapid increase in microcontroller performance. This paper will list the key factors necessary to increase overall data throughput and provide the right features to satisfy the coming drivetrain requirements. The paper will address different aspects such as: microcontroller architecture, cores, memories, silicon technologies, assembly / packaging, and development tools. It will also present techniques to improve modularity, scalability and configurability that will offer a migration path to permit the evolution and even revolution of drivetrain electronics. Since quality and reliability requirements are among the most stringent of any application fields, the paper will outline the path to reach zero-defect products.

Prototyping of a complete powertrain controller is not generally permissible due to the large number of subsystems involved and the resources required in making the design a reality. The availability of a complete control system reference design at an early stage in the lifecycle can greatly enhance the quality of the system definition and allows early ideas to be prototyped in the application environment. This paper describes the implementation of such a reference design for a gasoline engine and gearbox management control system, integrated into robust housing which can be used for development in a prototype vehicle. The paper also outlines the powertrain subsystems involved, discusses how the system partitioning is achieved, shows the implementation of the partitioning into the physical hardware, and concludes with presenting the system benefits which can be realized.

The signal delivery and quality of sensor data is of growing importance for modern automotive control applications. Sensors tend to be calibrated subsystems that are designed to stay in a defined tolerance and thus can easily be modeled. Compared to this deterministic behavior the transmission channel is time variant due to EMC and aging of contacts for example. The use of analog signaling, which is the actual state of realization in many cases, is sensitive to the time variant effects mentioned before. This time variance is hard to consider for the control system development. In this paper we will analyze the role of the sensor in the signal supply chain and discuss approaches for digital sensor-ECU communication and their potential to establish a link, which allows neglecting low level effects of the channel.

Infineon's latest high-end automotive microcontrollers like TC1796 are complex Systems On Chip (SoC) with two processor cores and up to two internal multi-master buses. The complex interaction between cores, peripherals and environment provides a big challenge for debugging. For mission critical control like engine management the debugging approach must not be intrusive. The provided solution are dedicated Emulation Devices which are able to deal with several 10 Gbit/s of raw internal trace data with nearly no cost adder for mass production and system design. Calibration, which is used later in the development cycle, has different requirements, but is covered by the Emulation Devices as well. The architecture of TC1796ED comprises the unchanged TC1796 silicon layout, extended by a full In-Circuit Emulator (ICE) and calibration overlay memory on the same die. In most cases, the only debug/calibration tool hardware needed is a USB cable.

The increasing legal requirements for safety, emission reduction, fuel economy and onboard diagnosis systems push the market for more innovative solutions with rapidly increasing complexity. Hence, the embedded systems that will have to control the automobiles have been developed at such an extent that they are now equivalent in scale and complexity to the most sophisticated avionics systems. This paper will demonstrate the key elements to provide a powerful, scalable and configurable solution that offers a migration pass to evolution and even revolution of automotive Sensors and Sensor interfaces. The document will explore different architectures and partitioning. Sensor technologies such as magnetic field sensors based on the hall effect as well as bulk and surface silicon micro machined sensors will be mapped to automotive applications by examples. Functions such as self-test, self-calibration and self-repair will be developed.

The increasing legal requirements for safety, emission reduction, fuel economy and onboard diagnosis systems is pushing the market for more innovative solutions with rapidly increasing complexity. Hence, the embedded systems that will have to control the automobiles have been developed at such an extent that they are now equivalent in scale and complexity to the most sophisticated avionics systems. The former analogue filter design is now replaced by digital signal processing. This paper will demonstrate the key elements to provide a powerful, scalable and configurable solution that offers a migration route to evolve and even revolutionize automotive electronics. To illustrate this migration toward digital processing the knock function has been developed. A simple RC filter is used as external anti-aliasing. To get the maximum flexibility the signal is very early converted and processed digitally. The micro-controller has been developed using a three-layered solution.

Driven by factors like consumption, power output per liter, comfort and more stringent exhaust gas standards the powertain control area, has developed rapidly in the last decades. This trend has also brought with it many innovations in the ignition application. Today we can see a trend to Pencil-coil or Plug-top-coil ignition systems. The next step in system partitioning is to remove the power driver from the ECU and place it directly in/on the coil body. The advantages of the new partitioning - e.g. no high voltage wires, reduced power dissipation on the ECU - are paid with different, mainly tougher requirements for the electronic components. By using specialized technologies for the different functions - IGBT for switching the power, SPT for protection, supply and diagnostics - in chip-on-chip technology all required functions for a decentralized ignition system can be realized in a TO220/ TO263 package.

This paper will outline the results of a study performed to analyze the market introduction of x-by-wire applications in the context of weak global industry environment, technological and legislative challenges, standardization issues and end customer benefits. This paper attempts to provide a bird-view on influence factors and impacts for the x-by-wire market, including e.g. the end customer's acceptance and legal environment driving further development in specific areas. Further, major driving forces on semiconductor/component level will be outlined regarding e.g. pin-count, computation performance and heat dissipation, but also possible scenarios and solutions towards safe and efficient system design and partitioning.

This paper outlines the results of a study performed to analyze the mission of TTCAN from applications to products for automotive systems. As commonly acknowledged communication is one of the key elements for future and even present systems such as an automobile. A dramatically increasing number of busses and gateways even in low- to midrange vehicles is putting significant burden upon the validation scenario as well as the cost. Accordingly, numerous new initiatives have been started worldwide in order to find solutions to this; some of them by the definition of enhanced or new protocols. This paper shall have a look particular on the new standard of TTCAN (time-triggered communication on CAN). This protocol is based on the CAN data link layer as specified in ISO 11898-1 and may use standardized CAN physical layers such as specified in ISO 11898-2 (high-speed transceiver) or in ISO 11898-3 (fault-tolerant low-speed transceiver).

Increasing fuel costs and emission regulations are driving the car manufacturers to develop powerful but efficient engines. The 3-liter car (3-liter/100 km fuel consumption → 80 miles/gallon) is one achievement of these developments. Beside the pure mechanics electronics for fuel and air management are getting the key element for further improvement. Direct Injected (DI) engines are the standard for Diesel and are looking very promising for Gasoline. This SAE paper will discuss the differences of the operation principle of a solenoid and a Piezo based injector as well as the impact and the requirements for the semiconductors on the ECU especially under respect of future emission standards. A solution from Infineon Technologies will be presented.

Infineon proposes a Quasi-Autonomous Gate Driver (QAGD) to manage an electrically actuated component, whether electromechanical, electromagnetic, or electrohydraulic. This paper examines some current control strategies that can be implemented within the QAGD, such as: Synchronous Sampling (SYSA), Hysteresis, Improved Synchronous Sampling-Hysteresis (ISSH), Suboscillation, Suboscillation with Back EMF Feedforward (SBEF) and Synchronous Control in Rotation Coordinates (SCRC). Analysis and simulation of these strategies indicate their advantages and disadvantages, which are then summarized in a comparison chart, from which the best solution for a given application can be determined. The QAGD IC proposed by Infineon adopts this solution by integrating the current controller and the driver unit for the MOSFETs in a single package. The inverter function can therefore be implemented using one QAGD and several MOSFETs, which greatly simplify the system and decrease the costs.